Plea deal for former Tyson employee

Company maintains no smuggling conspiracy

WilliamSpain

SPRINGDALE, Ark. (CBS.MW) -- The sky may be falling on chicken giant Tyson Foods as a key figure in the government's illegal alien smuggling case against the company may end up testifying against it.

On Monday, the Associated Press reported that former Tyson
TSN, +0.17%
employee Amador Anchondo-Rascon agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge. While the U.S. Attorney declined to tell the AP if he would be testifying against Tyson executives as part of the deal, a federal judge warned him that his sentence would depend partly on how much he helped prosecutors.

He currently faces up to five years in prison and $250,000 fine for his role in the conspiracy.

Late Monday, Tyson issued a statement saying that Anchondo-Rascon was "very briefly in the early 1990s an hourly employee of Tyson Foods." He now operates a grocery store in Shelbyville, Tenn., the company said, and "apparently describes himself as the 'Boss of Bosses' in the local underworld of forged document and undocumented worker trafficking."

Local police, the company continued, have called him "the biggest bad guy in the whole situation."

The company reiterated that it "was absolutely not involved in any conspiracy to violate immigration laws" and said that a few mid-level managers "made mistakes by allowing the undercover agents to deliver fraudulently documented workers" to some of its plants.

Tyson also pointed out that INS sleuths were the ones who actually delivered a handful of illegals to Anchondo-Rascon as part of sting operation, "an acknowledgement that it was the undercover agents doing the smuggling, not Tyson Foods."

The company added that "it is interesting to note" that the government today dropped all charges against an hourly worker who had been subject to the undercover operation and was charged with aiding and abetting the transportation of undocumented workers.

Just before Christmas, and following more than two years of undercover investigation by agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the government charged the company with conspiracy to "smuggle illegal aliens to Tyson Foods processing facilities in the United States for profit."

The 36-count indictment covered alleged illegal activities at 15 Tyson plants in nine states. Six employees, in addition to the company itself, were the named defendants. At the time, prosecutors charged that that "Tyson Foods cultivated a corporate culture in which the hiring of illegal alien workers was condoned in order to meet production goals and cut costs to maximize profits."

The government also detailed a "scheme by which the defendants requested delivery of illegal aliens to work at Tyson plants in the United States and aided and abetted them in obtaining false documents so they could work at Tyson poultry processing plants."

In a sharp response to the charges the same day they were unsealed, the meat behemoth labeled the claim of a corporate conspiracy "completely false," and insisted that "specific charges are limited to a few managers who were acting outside of company policy."

The company said it had "worked in conjunction with the INS relative to this case for the past 18 months -- from the moment we learned" the undercover operation was in place. The company also said that it "has taken a number of actions to help ensure that all of our team members are legally documented," including discontinuing the use of temporary employment agencies, conducting regular paperwork audits and training managers to detect improperly documented workers.

Tyson also promised to vigorously defend itself, noting, "this indictment came because Tyson refused to agree to the prosecutor's outrageous financial demands."

The poultry giant is currently facing a full legal docket: In early December, Tulsa, Okla., filed suit against the company and six other poultry processors. That action, also filed in federal court, claims that the waste from chicken production has caused the "premature death" of local lakes and led to "overwhelming taste and odor problems in the city's drinking water."

Then, on New Years Eve, Tyson subsidiary IBP said that federal regulators were investigating alleged tampering by an employee at a meat-processing plant in Indiana that lead to the recall of about 130 tons of pork products.

On the plus side, the company said Friday that said it expects first-quarter earnings to be between 34 cents to 36 cents a share, up from the company's previous estimates of 22 cents to 27 cents a share and the Thomson Financial/First Call consensus for EPS of 25 cents.

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